I asked this question on Quora a few days ago: http://www.quora.com/Facebook-1/Why-is-the-new-Facebook-Add-... but did not get any responses.
Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
131–140 of 168 posts
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#132The important thing to take away from this: If they can make guesses this accurate about your photos, imagine they guesses they're making behind the scenes about your life, your personality and your innermost thoughts. If there was a page on fb where it showed all the inferences they had made about you, sexuality, income, religion, philosophical viewpoints, mental health, etc. then people would run screaming. Of cour…
"It seems you've been watching a lot of porn lately. Do you want to post an update about it?"
That's funny, but I've been told some porn sites have social widgets. I don't know who would want to share that, but there they are.
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#133The outrage expressed by some of the commenters on Reddit and here is curious. Clearly Facebook and other companies have the technology to make these connections. Would you rather they keep it hidden to sell to advertisers and other potentially unscrupulous buyers, or expose it to you so that you can either make use of the features, or decide it's not worth playing their game?
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#134Ignoring the how of this new feature, what is the upside to me as a user of confirming to Facebook the hospital in which my child was born? Why do they think people would generally be interested in clicking "Yes" on these suggestions? That they are helpfully filling in the blanks on photos I "forgot" to location-tag?
The upside to you is that your photographs are tagged and categorized in more and more useful ways. Without this suggestion what is the likelihood that you would go back to old albums and tag them in such a way? I know for me, it's almost zero. When it's presented in such a frictionless manner (and is eerily accurate) it becomes a hell of a lot more likely. I think that the typical HN user is either too cynical or too tech-savvy to really find this useful. Most users have huge collections of photos that aren't necessarily categorized in useful ways.
Facebook wants its users to catalog their lives. For them, this data is marketing gold. For end users, it means their content (photos, status updates, life events, etc) are categorized more thoroughly and in a more meaningful fashion (geographically, chronologically, etc).
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, with all the Facebook sharing buttons around the web they have more than your bookmarks too, they have the equivalent of uploading your browser history each day to them. With current machine learning technology, let alone improvements over the coming years, they'd know more or less what someone would know if they stood behind every time you were browsing for the last few years. Even if you were to cancel your…
While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far more cautious. How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in their best interests? I'm t…
I think this article, "Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'" [1], makes a compelling case. There are essentially two reasons why privacy is important. The first is that privacy can be used to 'hide bad things'. This is what the 'nothing to hide' argument addresses: if you don't do bad things, you should not worry about privacy. The problem is that not everyone agrees on which things are bad. For example, do you agree that the OWS protesters terrorists?
But privacy is not just about hiding bad things. A multitude of innocuous facts about many people, collected in a database, are themselves a powerful tool. The data can be mined by governments to look for 'suspicious' behavior, by insurance companies to deny insurance, by criminals to commit fraud, etc.
I think the basic problem is that violations of privacy give power in the hands governments and corporations, and these entities tend to abuse whatever power you give them.
[1] http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#136Karan from the locations team at Facebook posted a response on Reddit. He said:
""" I am an engineer at Facebook working on the Locations team. We use the text entered in the location field of the album by the album owner and match it to the best guess for an existing Facebook Page using text matching. The popularity of the place is also used to rank the suggested places. """
http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/nkktm/facebook_is_reall...
(I work at Facebook, not on locations/photos.)
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its also not a good thing that we don't know who Facebook or Google is selling this or giving this information to. The advertising agencies, meh kinda. The organisations with acronyms, they are more worrisome. I also wonder, to what extent the amount of information they have about the average user.
BTW, Google seems to be pretty open with what they know about you. Here are two links where they display an explicit list: https://www.google.com/dashboard/ and http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
This is certainly not everything they know about you. This is part of their initiative to be not-evil, it’s called Data Liberation Front[1]. In their own words:
> Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you. [2]
It’s absolutely terrific that they have something like this. Many others had to be dragged there kicking and screaming.
However, this is just not relevant to the topic at hand. This is “your data”, the data that you deliberately created, rather than revealed accidentally. The point of the project is to avoid vendor lock-in, rather than to protect your privacy.
If you’re EU resident, you should be able to just write to them and they have to reveal everything they have on you. And that list will be entirely different from this.
[1] http://www.dataliberation.org/
[2] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-choice-ens...
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#138This was just answered on Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-photo-albu...
Henry F. Bridge, Product Manager, Facebook
Photo albums on Facebook have long had a text input field for location, but until recently, there was no way to put in structured data in this field (like a Facebook page). We added that ability earlier this year, and the "add a location" feature just performs a search on whatever text the album owner put in originally (ranked by place popularity etc) and suggests the first result as the location of the album.
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, with all the Facebook sharing buttons around the web they have more than your bookmarks too, they have the equivalent of uploading your browser history each day to them. With current machine learning technology, let alone improvements over the coming years, they'd know more or less what someone would know if they stood behind every time you were browsing for the last few years. Even if you were to cancel your…
While people like to think that it's more or less anonymized clusters and demographics that are being passed to advertisers to target ads better - not a terribly scary thought, just more relevant ads - I think we need to be far more cautious. How do you go about convincing the "I have nothing to hide" majority of the population that giving away such vast quantities of information is not in their best interests? I'm t…
You can ask to watch them having sex. They have nothing to hide, right?
Re: Facebook machine learning technology improves; Redditors alaramed.
#140This was just answered on Quora: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-predict-my-photo-albu... Henry F. Bridge, Product Manager, Facebook Photo albums on Facebook have long had a text input field for location, but until recently, there was no way to put in structured data in this field (like a Facebook page). We added that ability earlier this year, and the "add a location" feature just performs a search on whateve…
Very sophisticated. Almost like magic :)